#page two is prepped and will be out soon! there should be six pages lol so i'll try to keep an upload schedule this time

[hoperaypegasus]

1 / 2 / 3(coming soon)

[freeuselandonorris]

7, 24, 32 for the writer ask!

writing asks!!!

annoyingly i filled most of this out and then tumblr ate my answers SO take two!

What is your deepest joy about writing?

so this isn’t joy, per se, but i had a conversation with @lost-decade recently where i mentioned that i think a lot of my attraction to writing comes from the fact that i am, at heart, a horrible little control freak (positively unheard of in kink community etc etc) and thus it is very satisfying to me on a deep lizard brain level to put characters in situations and then make those situations conform to my wishes. my writing output always goes up dramatically when i am feeling overwhelmed or uncertain in life and i think this is a big part of it.

but also, i am a person who gets obsessed with things! i am all or nothing! i get obsessed with people (or rather their public personas, fourth wall and all that) and media and scenarios and kinks and tiny little details and big philosophical concepts. writing lets me poke at all those things. picture me like gollum holding a snow globe, shaking it up over and over again to watch how the flakes fall.

24. How much prep work do you put into your stories? What does that look like for you? Do you enjoy this part or do you just want to get on with it?

i’ll talk about fic first as that’s what people on here know me for writing-wise. the answer here is: it depends! for my slutty little one-shots i tend to do very little research; stuff like crosstown traffic or a lot like life are largely unplanned or inspired by one real-life event that sparks an idea (although i guess you could say i researched the njoy plug in a lot like life in the sense that i own one lmao).

with longer fics, particularly RPF, i LOVE fitting my fic timelines into real-life events. this is particularly satisfying with motorsport RPF because the races give the year a very particular and easy-to-research structure. so for longer fics like there was always warmth between us i watched a ton of youtube videos and clips of max and daniel for both timeline inspiration and characterisation (although honestly i read that fic back the other day and my dialogue for them is so generic at times gjrskjfs), plus i wrote it relatively soon after the season itself.

with the toto/christian sequel to all the blood runs hot before it’s cold i’m working on, i wrote myself some notes of what themes i want to explore, plus a timeline of last season so that i could tie those themes into the arc of the season, like so:

i probably won’t use all those notes in the final piece, but it gives me a structure to work from.

for original writing, again it depends. for short stories and poetry i tend to free write for a bit beforehand until something appears from the ether that i can use as a starting point. for my novel-in-progress, when i wrote the first draft i basically did…maybe a page of planning? this was a bad idea. it was a mess. i resisted planning for ages but eventually i had to admit that for long-form pieces i cannot adequately structure my writing without one. so i went back and wrote a very elaborate plan using the six-arc story structure, which allows for much more freedom than a traditional ‘save the cat’ style beat sheet. highly recommend. i try not to do too much research beforehand (which is hard given i’m writing a novel about AI, something i have very little practical knowledge of!) because i just get bogged down and end up procrastinating.

jeez, that was an essay.

32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again? How did you find it? What does it mean to you?

oh lol there are SO MANY. i have a few of them tattooed on me. let me answer all three of those with the first example that comes to mind:

for poem, ‘turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer’ from the second coming by wb yeats haunts me. the whole poem haunts me, actually, for reasons that should be obvious upon reading. but those lines utterly terrify me.

for novel, again there’s hundreds but the one that first came to mind was ‘you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style’ from lolita by vladimir nabokov. lolita is one of the books i’ve re-read the most because it is a complete masterpiece, and this line embodies that to me. it’s clever, it’s funny, it’s defensive, it slides in a fantastically important plot point in the shape of a joke. amazing.

from fic, this is maybe a random example but the first one i thought of was this line from darkest little paradise (F1, pierre/charles) by heroics: 'Charles clutches him for another moment, squeezes the back of Pierre’s neck, resists the urge to drop to his knees right here and let Pierre do whatever he wants with Charles’s soft body.' i don’t know what it is about it, something about ‘soft body’. it’s just a line that has really stuck with me as a beautiful example of a dynamic (both in the relationship sense and, a bit, in the kink sense) described with such restraint.

eta: fuck at risk of making this post even more unnecessarily long i just realised i would be utterly remiss not to mention ‘She wants to know where this moral fortitude was when he had her flat on her back in that dark little cottage. Wonders if he had to fuck her to find it. If she has to always be the one to pay for it.’ from @widespindriftgaze’s astonishing taskmaster RPF masterpiece broke both early and late (part 2 in a series), which i have never managed to read without crying.

thank you for asking! ❤️

from this writing asks post. i love shit like this (as you can see from how fuckin long this got); please feel free to ask more if you're reading this!

[alltooreid]

congrats on 100<33

✏️ - idk if this is a good enough concept but something along the lines of reader being scared of something (can be a thunder storm or haunted house or anything u want lol) and spencer comforts reader

(reader can be fem. (she/her) or gn (they/them), it doesn’t matter to me)

i hope this made sense, i didn’t wna go to into detail that way u could work freely with it lolll 💓

omg this makes perfect sense and it’s such a cute idea!! I went a little overboard and this got really long because I added a little meet-cute situation but I hope you love it anyway!! Also I changed Y/N’s fear because I had a really good idea and you were so open!

Pairing: Spencer Reid x GN! Reader

Type: comfort so like angst/fluff idk??

Word Count: 1.4K (oops)

Content Warnings: discussion of blood

When Y/N was five years old they told their mom they wanted to be a doctor. However, when one is five years old they assume being a doctor only entails helping people, being nice to children and giving them lollipops and that seemed like the best career choice ever.

However, when Y/N was six years old they went on a bike ride with their next door neighbor, a girl their age named Rebecca. This particular neighborhood friend loved to play dangerously and had conceived a game like tag, however you had to stay on the bike the entire time. Although innocent on paper, about 12 minutes into the game Rebecca had stood up on the seat of her bicycle in an attempt to get a better reach at Y/N and tumbled over the front handlebars.

She shook it off quickly and by the time Y/N had rushed over to help she was already on her feet.

“Are you okay?” Y/N asked in a panic.

Rebecca brushed some rocks off her shorts, looked up at Y/N and smiled, “Yep! That was so much fun!” she said, going in for a high five.

Rebecca however, was not okay and had failed to notice that two of the “rocks” she had brushed off were actually her two front teeth. When she smiled and spoke to Y/N they were overcome with panic when they saw her mouth, missing two teeth and gushing blood.

So naturally, they immediately passed out.

Rebecca quickly ran to get her mother, more concerned for Y/N than herself, and still hadn’t even noticed her teeth’s absence. Both children were driven to the hospital, and although Y/N woke up on the way, they got checked out to make sure they didn’t have a concussion.

Soon after they were clear Y/N’s parents arrived. Hovering over their six year old and asking all sorts of questions, the first and only thing Y/N thought to do is turn to their mother. “Mom?”

“Yes sweetheart?”

“I don’t think I wanna be a doctor anymore.”

Y/N’s mother laughed and wrapped her arms around the crying child, “Maybe that’s not the best idea.”

Even with their fear of blood, Y/N career ambitions remained the same: help people, be nice to children, hand out lollipops. So when they graduated Y/N started their own candy store. It was the perfect job for such a sweet soul, and by the time they were 28 Y/N had perfected their storefront. Glass displays were replaced with plastic to prevent people cutting themselves if they broke, they keep a small collection of different patterned and themed band-aids right next to the cash register and without fail had at least one medical student working in the summer in between school years (in case of emergencies).

But no amount of prepping could help Y/N when Dr. Spencer Reid came into their store with his four year old godson.

Y/N couldn’t help but smile as they watched Spencer and Henry zoom around the empty store, Henry throwing all kinds of sugary sweets into his basket and Spencer encouraging the entire thing. Soon enough the two were at the register and dumping at least eighty dollars worth of candy on the counter. Y/N began ringing it up, but was soon interrupted by the small child, barely in sight because of the desk in front of him.

“Excuse me? Do you have a band-aid? I got a paper cut.”

“Yes I do! What kind of band-aid do you want?”

“Ummmm do you have Spiderman?”

“Of course I have Spiderman! Here you go,” they said, setting it on the counter.

“Can you put it on for me?” He reached up his little finger to show Y/N his cut.

Quickly jolting their head, Y/N panicked “Um maybe you could have your dad help you with that. . .”

“Of course, I’m sorry, and I’m actually his godfather. . . “ He looked up and noticed Y/N’s aversion to the cut, “It’s safe to look now.”

Y/N sighed, “I’m sorry, I just can’t stand blood. What did he cut it on?”

Henry was entertaining himself flipping through the pages of his godfather’s abnormally large book, not reading it of course, because although Henry was smart for a four year old, he was not yet fluent in Russian.

“Oh nothing that’s your fault,” the man said. He was then nudged by his godson, and apparently, personal wingman, “Um, I’m Spencer!”

“Hi Spencer! I’m Y/N,” they smiled, finishing their calculations, “Um, your total is $81.92”

He was thrown off, “That’s not right, it should be 96.37. . . Did you forget something?”

“Actually your forgetting my 15% injury discount, and the extra lollipop I give to nice kids,” they reached down to hand Henry a raspberry lemonade lollipop.

“You really don’t have to do that! It was my fault really-”

“No seriously, trust me I’m kind of ripping you off here. I combined the injury discount and the cute guy discount.”

Spencer blushed, “Um well maybe we could go get coffee sometime to make it up to me.”

“I would love that”

On this coffee date Y/N learned about Spencer’s job and was shocked he would go on a date with someone who was scared of papercuts. However Spencer explained he found it admirable that someone could be so affected by other people’s pain, and later into their relationship discussed how he wished he was as affected by the gore of his job as he was during the beginning.

Their romance worked perfectly, Spencer loved having someone waiting at home for him, a person who could be completely separate from work and the cases that affected him so much that he needed to talk about them typically ended up involving more manipulation than gore.

But just over a year in Y/N got a phone call from Aaron Hotchner.

Spencer had been shot in the neck.

They got to the hospital as soon as possible, and rushed to Spencer’s room, completely forgetting about the things they were almost certainly going to see.

So when Y/N walked in at the worst possible moment, as Spencer was getting his gauze changed and his open wound was in full view, they freaked out, letting out a quick scream and crouching to the ground, covering their eyes with their hands.

“Y/N! You’re here!”

Y/N did their best and eventually had made their way to Spencer’s bedside chairs, only having to peek twice. Once there, Y/N’s hands remained firmly locked over their eyes, both to protect themselves from the blood and to cover their panicked tears from Spencer.

“Y/N, close your eyes tight and remove your hands for me darling.”

They shook their head aggressively. Spencer sighed, “Trust me, I’ve got you.” So they did, and as they kept their eyes glued shut, Y/N felt Spencer use his thumb to wipe tears from their cheeks, before tying something around their eyes.

“See, now you can’t see the blood, and I can hold you,” he said, grabbing one of Y/N’s hands and kissing the back of it now that gauze had been tied around their eyes.

Quickly Y/N wrapped their arms around Spencer’s middle as best as they could with him laying down, and cried into him. Spencer soothed them by petting their hair, “It’s okay darling, they just changed the gauze so it’s gone now, there’s no more blood if you feel ready to take it off.”

Y/N sobbed more and ripped their makeshift blind fold off, “I’m so stupid. . . You got shot and you have to comfort me because of a little blood . . .”

“No, no, no. Don’t talk about yourself like that, you are not stupid. You’re scared and overwhelmed. I already knew I was okay but you didn’t when you came in there, not only that but as soon as you came into this extremely stressful situation you were greeted with your worst fear. You’re all I’m worried about right now.”

Y/N smiled “I’m so happy you’re okay. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Well luckily you don’t have to worry about it.”

-Thank you for reading!! please reblog and let me know what you think :)))

Holly’s tiny taglist!!: @hercleverboy @reidingmelodies @rigatonireid @muffin-cup @takeyouleap-of-faith 

(let me know if you want to be added or removed!!)

[mangokiwitropicalswirl]

A little update about Paging Dr. Scully

So many of you have been kindly asking for another update of “Paging Dr. Scully,” and I admittedly tried to light a fire under my heels with this @fictober effort. But truth be told, I haven’t been able to write more than short bits of fiction in the past six or so weeks. Today, I was trying to think about WHY I’ve been stymied in my writing efforts and I realized that I actually have a very good reason, which I share with you now.

Since the end of August, I have slowly shed more than 10 pounds and am now at a weight I haven’t seen in about a decade. There’s been a wedding and two kids in the intervening years, so I am feeling very proud of myself and thought I should share my triumph with y’all.

Accomplishing this has meant working out and meal prepping during my kids naps/TV breaks when I would otherwise be writing or doing house chores. Instead of writing during my kid’s swimming lesson, I have channeled Stella Gibson and done laps. Instead of writing during nap time, I have remembered David’s comments on a fangirl’s ripped arms (at the Kennedy Center event last winter) and done squats and lifted hand weights. LOL!

All of which is to say, I feel bad that I’ve not been more prompt about my Dr. Scully updates, but I see very clearly that in order to say Yes to something, you always have to say No to something else. I hope that’s a little encouragement to those of you who might be feeling overwhelmed with all the ordinary responsibilities of adulting that life asks of us. There’s too much to do it all well, so don’t feel bad if some things fall by the wayside while you’re pursuing goals that are important to you. Hugs Fandom, and thanks for cheering on my writing. I hope to have some soon.